Feedback can and should be gathered in a number of ways. Most feedback will come through direct conversations with your customers in a variety of channels, but you can also gather feedback simply through observation.

It’s important that you don’t rely only on one method, such as email (although email can still be very effective). You’ll find that customers respond differently depending on which phase you’re in; pre-launch beta users tend to be more engaged than casual post-launch trial users. You might also find that some customers prefer email, others prefer chat and some people will give you better feedback over the phone or in person.

The bottom line is that you must keep the lines of communication open at all times — from the idea phase through launch and beyond.

Feedback on Your Idea

So you’ve come up with what you think is a brilliant idea for your startup. Should you drop everything, lock yourself in your office and start coding the first version? Of course not.

Your very first step — before you do anything else — should be to start talking to people. Tell people about your idea, and don't worry about them stealing it. There is greater risk in not talking to people than the risk that someone might take your idea. You want to avoid investing a lot of time and money on an idea that nobody cares about, so you should start talking to people now to see if this idea is worthwhile.

You’re probably so excited about this concept that you want to tell a few friends about it, and that’s a good start. See if this concept even remotely makes sense to anyone but yourself, but don’t spend too much time talking to friends. They’ll tend to give you positive feedback just because they’re your friends (even if you ask them to be critical). More importantly, your friends are not necessarily your target customers.

Your next step should be seek out between five and 10 people who you would consider to be your target customers and start some conversations. Don’t be shy. Have an idea to help clothing retail store owners sell more clothes? Walk into a mall and meet a few store owners. Want to build a tool to help programmers optimize their code? Introduce yourself on programming forums and local developer meetups.

Your goal at this stage is to identify the pain point, or the problem your product aims to solve. You might have this problem yourself, and that might have led to the idea in the first place, but it's important that you validate the fact that others have this same problem, or some variation of it.

Ask open-ended questions, like:

"How do you currently handle X, Y or Z?"

"What frustrates you about that?"

"What else?" Dig deeper and get them to tell you more.

Don't go straight into your pitch; start by asking a lot of questions. Your only objective at this point is to gain a solid understanding of each individual person, what their frustrations and pain points are, and learn what they value most.

Feedback Leading Up to Launch

Once you've validated the pain point with target customers, it's time to dig deeper. You need customer feedback to validate the concept of your product, and whether or not it's something worth customers' money.

At this stage, you should have some kind of landing page on your website to collect email addresses. There are a variety of ways to go about this: Some startups have a simple "coming soon" page, while others offer educational or otherwise valuable content in exchange for a visitor's email address.

However you choose to build your pre-launch list, it is imperative that you reach out and personally contact each and every subscriber. Strike up a conversation over email and try to schedule a phone call.

Now your job is to conduct in-depth interviews to get an even clearer understanding of customer's pain points, values and how your product might benefit them. Unlike your first round of interviews, in which you reached out to potential target customers, you’re now having conversations with customers who expressed interest in what you’re doing. That makes this stage of customer feedback even more valuable.

Feedback on Your Content

A smart way to build an audience, both before and after your launch, is to put out a lot of valuable content. Start blogging, put out YouTube videos, send email newsletters or give away a free ebook.

Your goal as you produce and release content should be twofold: It's a great way to build your list and drive traffic to your website, but more importantly, it's another vehicle for soliciting feedback.

Include a call-to-action at the end of your blog articles, or at the end of your email newsletter, asking readers to respond with questions and comments. Monitor which articles are being shared and talked about the most.

Gathering feedback on your content is a great way to learn what the most common questions, challenges and goals of your audience are. You can use this feedback to create and release even more valuable content. You can also use it to inform your copywriting and marketing messages — every bit helps.

Early Traction Feedback

The big day has arrived! You’ve launched your startup, or at least opened the doors to beta customers, and hopefully you're still collecting feedback.

Of course, the first feedback you're looking for is whether or not customers are pulling out their wallets and entering their credit card information. If this is not happening (within a reasonable timeframe), you might need to circle back to those conversations you had earlier. Ask for follow-up conversations with those early customers to see how their views might have changed since you launched.

Are you offering a free trial period? Use a tool like Intercom.io to monitor activity in your app and see which areas might be causing friction for customers. Reach out to those trial users to help with the onboarding process. Beyond helping them use your app, ask them questions, including:

"How did you find us?"

"What made you decide to start your trial?"

"What’s the biggest thing holding you back from upgrading to a paid account?"

Use this feedback to help you improve your sales funnel. Promote the benefits — as described by your customers — on your marketing website. Smooth out the onboarding process, based on what you learned by helping trial users. Make the necessary tweaks to overcome the biggest objections users have to upgrading.

Ongoing Customer Feedback

Customer feedback isn't just for the pre-launch and early traction phase of your startup. It's critical that you prioritize customer feedback on an ongoing basis.

Your cancellation form is one place where you should always gather feedback. Customer cancellations are a fact of life for every startup. No founder likes seeing customers leave, but cancellations present a valuable opportunity to learn what is causing dissatisfaction with your product. Add a required text input where customers must fill in their reason for canceling, and then look for patterns and plug those holes to lower your cancellation rate.

Customer support is another great place to process valuable feedback, and it's why founders should be the ones manning the customer support requests for as long as possible before outsourcing it.

Don't look at customer support as just a place for getting customer's questions answered. Look for common areas where customers are running into trouble. Look for commonly asked questions. Make notes for ways to improve your product and website copy. This won't only reduce repeat support questions, but it will also make your product even easier to use, making for a delightful experience that customers will happily recommend to others.

Customer feedback will also help you determine which new features to prioritize. Stay in constant contact with your most active customers, and get their feedback on early prototypes of new features. See how customers react to introductions of new features.

Sometimes, it could be beneficial to remove a feature from your product. Perhaps it's causing too much confusion, or it's difficult to maintain. Of course, you should only do this if you're confident that few, if any, customers are using this feature. Try removing it and see if anybody complains. In this case, if you’re getting little or no customer feedback, that’s a good thing.

What are some of the ways you're collecting and leveraging customer feedback in your startup? Share them with us in the comments.

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